THE MAN WHO WAS A SPOON

In the early days of developing THE MAN WHO WAS A SPOON, we titled the show before we knew what it was. A man who was a spoon—something impossible, unstable, unresolvable. The performance grew from that impossibility: awkwardness that won’t release, presence that dissolves into mirrors, conversations that fold back on themselves.

Cão Solteiro and I started with an affinity for dislocated experiences—weirdness, intimacy, obscenity, confusion—stretched to the edges of a possible reality. Out of those conversations grew a work on recognition and misrecognition, on perception, reality, and illusion.

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THE MAN WHO WAS A SPOON unfolds in two simultaneous modes: inside a booth, a performer and a guest have an unscripted conversation, reaching into the gaps between clarity and disorientation. Outside, staged visual hauntings bend perceptions, actions, and reflections.

Using a deconstructed Pepper’s Ghost effect—a 19th-century illusion exposed and reframed—the piece layers and multiplies bodies and presences. It invites spectators into a dislocation: where what you see, what you hear, and what you understand never quite settle into alignment. Things are not as they seem.

Each night, the relationship between these modes—speech and image, thought and reflection—shifts unpredictably. Sometimes they mirror each other; sometimes they diverge.

What emerges is a fractured perceptual space: familiar and strange, lucid and unstable.

It’s like a kind of a haunted roadside attraction—a performance of doubles, distortions, and strange recognitions.

THE MAN WHO WAS A SPOON premiered at Teatro do Bairro Alto, Lisbon, in March 2024.